Even Ice Cream Companies Are Trying Their Hand at Weird, Dystopian Cinema

If you’ve never had the pleasure of encountering Halo Top ice scream, I’ve got some world-changing news for you: no longer will you need to feel bad for eating ice cream by the pint! The California ice cream company, which recently passed Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs to become the highest-selling ice cream in grocery stores, is the current zeitgeist of low-calorie sweets. Sure, maybe the flavor is a little more bland than you’d prefer, and sure, maybe eating ice cream by the pint — regardless of its constitution — is probably not the best idea, but at only 240 calories a pop? You could do a lot worse with your stress-eating.

And now Halo Top Creamery can add bizarre dystopian cinema to their list of achievements. It takes a lot of skill — or at least a really, really dark sense of humor — to entice entertainment websites to write about glorified commercials, but Mike Diva’s Eat the Ice Cream (via IndieWire) delivers both, picturing a nightmarish world where there is no family, there is no individuality, there’s only delicious, delicious ice cream. As noted by Halo Top, the short film-slash-commercial was also directly inspired by the white room in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it even has pretty solid pedigree to back it up.

While Diva has no feature films to his credit, he’s no stranger to idiosyncratic short films. Nerdist described his 2015 adaptation of the long-running comic book Grrl Scouts as a cross between “Scott Pilgrim and Broad City,” while iO9 described his 2014 short Thresher as a twisted little inter-dimensional horror story that “would have made Lovecraft proud.” With Eat the Ice Cream serving as a bit of a step up for the filmmaker, don’t be surprised if you see Diva suddenly in conversation for some independent horror films in the months to come. I mean, hey, it only took David F. Sandberg three years to go from DIY YouTube videos to the DCEU, right? Diva’s already halfway there!